Women Shared Mansplaining Experiences On Twitter & It Will Do Things To Your Blood Pressure

On Tuesday, Tracy Clayton, a BuzzFeed writer and co-host of the podcast "Another Round," asked her Twitter followers, “[W]omen, what's the most infuriating thing you've had mansplained to you?” A bevy of women shared their mansplaining experiences on Twitter, and their stories will sound hilariously, horribly familiar to any woman who’s had something mansplained to her before. (So, you know, that’s basically all of us.)

To be clear, mansplaining is not simply an instance of a man explaining something to a woman. There are countless, totally legit reasons that a guy might need to explain something to a woman. These include but are not limited to: when he is her instructor; when they are both trapped in a giant maze, and only he knows how to get out; when he is her doctor, and he needs to tell her about the surgery he’s going to perform; when there is a bear behind her, and it would be helpful for her to know about it; when she asks him to explain something.

Mansplaining is something different: It’s condescending, and often involves interrupting or speaking over someone else. It’s characterized by the speaker’s misplaced assumption that he (usually it’s a he) knows more about a subject than a woman does, but without any real basis for that assumption — he’s not an expert in that field, and he’s never had that experience. In many cases, he’ll make that assumption in spite of the fact that the person he’s speaking to is an expert in the subject or has firsthand experience. Obviously, people of any gender can be overbearing and rude, but, in these cases, the behavior is often rooted in a gendered belief that men’s voices are somehow more legitimate than women’s.

Clayton’s call for readers to share their experiences with mansplaining seems to have arisen from her own negative experience being driven to an airport:

Clayton asked Twitter users to describe similar experiences, and, boy, did they ever. Just FYI, you'll probably have steam rolling out of your ears by the end of this. The mansplaining stories fell into a few distinct categories: